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He Turned His Nobel Into a Prize for Women

When the neuroscientist Paul Greengard was named one of three winners of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he decided to use his award — almost $400,000 — to finance something new: the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize.

This honor, named for Dr. Greengard’s mother, would give an annual $50,000 prize to an outstanding female biomedical researcher. Of the 184 medical Nobelists, only 7 have been women.

“I hoped to bring more attention to the work of brilliant women scientists,” Dr. Greengard recently explained at his laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. “Perhaps this will bring them further recognition and even a Nobel.”

Dr. Greengard’s Nobel Prize, which was shared with Eric R. Kandel of Columbia University and Arvid Carlsson of Gothenberg University in Sweden, recognized his discoveries of how nerve cells communicate with one other.

A. There were two factors. One was the observation that there was still discrimination against women in science, even at the highest levels. On a personal level, I wanted to create something in honor of my mother, Pearl Meister, who died giving birth to me.

Q.Had your mother been a scientist?

A. She was a secretary until she married. I’m told she was an extremely bright woman. I didn’t even know of her existence until I was 20. Thirteen months after my birth, my father, who was Jewish, married an Episcopalian who kept me from knowing we were related to anyone named Meister.

I don’t have a single photograph of my mother. When I married, my wife, Ursula, put a picture of a woman we thought was Pearl Meister above our mantelpiece. Ten years later, we discovered this was someone else’s mother. Since there’s not a shred of physical evidence that my mother ever existed, I wanted to do something to make her less abstract.

Rockefeller University will be awarding the third annual Pearl Meister Greengard Prize in November. It will go, this year, to a British biologist, Mary Lyon.

Q.With such a painful childhood, did you become a neuroscientist to help relieve emotional suffering?

A. No. After attending college on the G.I. Bill in the late 1940’s, I wanted to do graduate work in physics. I was good at math and physics. But at that time, the only physics fellowships came from the Atomic Energy Commission. This was right after the A-bombing of Japan.

I didn’t want to spend my life contributing to the development of more atomic weaponry. So when the parents of my college roommate, two physicians, told me of the nascent field of biophysics, which used math and physics to solve biological problems, that appealed. I began studying electrical signaling in nerve cells. I became convinced that biochemistry played the critical role in how nerve cells communicated with each other. With time, I came to think that nerve transmitters — those chemicals that communicate from one nerve cell to another — produced their effects through a cascade of reactions that resulted in a physiological response. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, this was a really radical idea. For a long time, I had the field to myself. I didn’t have to worry about picking up Nature and finding my work scooped by another researcher.

Q.Is it true that this work eventually led to Prozac?

A. Research I did in the 1970’s provided the underlying science for the Prozac-type drugs. It turned out that Prozac and similar drugs work, in part, by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is widely believed to cause an antidepressant action in brain cells.

Q.Recently, your laboratory here at Rockefeller University announced the discovery of a new cell protein, p11. Why do you think this an important finding?

Photo

Paul Greengard; Ursula von Rydingsvard, his wife; and Alpha, his dog.Credit
Librado Romero/The New York Times

A. This p11 protein moves the serotonin receptors from the interior of the brain cell to its surface so that they can be seen by the serotonin. Our lab data, and some studies with post-mortem brain tissue, show that p11 levels appear to be a predictor of whether or not an individual is depressed.

Until now, when making antidepressants, we’ve been focused on changing serotonin levels in brain cells. Maybe we can try to increase the p11 levels? We need to find out how p11 levels are controlled. This could lead to a whole new class of antidepressants.

Q.I’ve heard it said that while the discovery is interesting, it doesn’t take brain research into any new direction. What’s your answer?

A. I disagree. This is the first example of a protein, the level of which has been found to correlate with a neurological or psychiatric disorder.

Q.You are 80 years old and your laboratory is still coming up with new findings. What does that mean?

A. It says that I’m a genetic freak. [Laughs.] No, it means that modern science has changed. It used to be that the big medical discoveries were made by people in their 30’s and 40’s. But in those days, the scientist was a kind of sole investigator working alone, testing ideas.

Today, the exciting developments come out of interdisciplinary working groups, where participants can be of any age. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that the leaders of teams making discoveries now are a lot older than they used to be.

And that’s good. It’s a tragedy for society to spend decades training people and then depriving them of work at some arbitrary age.

Q.Earlier, you said that one reason you set up this prize for female biologists was that you had witnessed much discrimination. What have you seen?

A. Nothing here at Rockefeller University, which is a good place for women. But I’ve seen instances of bias, big and small, at other institutions. I’ve seen women kept from academic committees, for instance, because they were female.

Q.In a recent article in Nature, the Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres complained that male scientists rarely speak out against antiwoman bias when they see it. Would you agree?

A. Whenever I’ve seen it, I’ve spoken up.

One of the most outrageous things I ever saw was at an Ivy League university. A faculty couple were divorcing. The husband told his male colleagues it upset him to see his ex when she went to the ladies’ room, near his laboratory. So this female scientist was ordered to take this circuitous route to the washroom — up a set of stairs, over a hallway and down another staircase — to protect the husband’s sensibilities. I said, “If you don’t change this, I will report it and we’ll all lose our grants.”

Q.Was it difficult to organize this prize?

A. Easier than one would think. With tax incentives, in some brackets, it can end up costing about 20 percent of the value of donation.

Three years ago, after we announced the first award, my wife and I received several hundred congratulatory messages. Many female scientists wrote and said: “I’ve suffered discrimination. This means so much to me.”

Well, it meant a lot to me, too.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page F5 of the New York edition with the headline: He Turned His Nobel Into a Prize for Women. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe